X-MEN: FIRST CLASS: 4 STARS

“X-Men: The Younguns” has its share of things that go boom but it doesn’t follow the summer blockbuster format. There aren’t action sequences every ten minutes, the characters actually talk to one another and there’s even subtitles! What a relief. After the heavy metal bombast of “Thor” and its ilk, “X-Men” is more like the art rock of a Radiohead disc—brainy but still fun.

From concentration camps in Poland to a mansion in Westchester, NY, “First Class” details the evolution of the mutant band of X-Men (and Women). We learn how the two most powerful mutants, Eric / Magneto (Michael Fassbender) and Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) get along long enough to put together a team of mutants, but soon find themselves on opposite side in a game of Free to Be You and Me. Add in some former Nazis, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Betty Draper and you have one of the most satisfyingly good blow-‘em’-up movies of the year so far.

“X-Men: First Class” is a bit talkier than you might expect from a big budget comic book movie, but at least they’re saying something. It isn’t just chatter. Mixed in with the action and the one-liners you expect from these kinds of films is a parable about tolerance and social context with a timely edge—one line in particular, “Security is more important than liberty,” sounds scarily up to date—but the reason it all works so well is that it has the best of all worlds, good crash-boom-bang, great villains, cool characters and a script that respects all of the above. If they wanted to make it less chatty, I suppose they could cut some of January Jones’s lines. One thing is for sure, acting is not her super power.

The other actors, however, do their best to make us forget that Patrick Stewart and Sir Ian McKellen once donned the mutant black and yellow uniforms. McAvoy brings real heart to the role of Xavier and Fassbender is edgy enough to really make us believe the rage that fuels Magneto. Of the teen mutants only Jennifer Lawrence, as the shape shifting blue lady Mystique and Nicholas Hoult as Beast do something interesting with their characters, even though Beast’s mask looks like a dollar store purchase. The others are underdeveloped embryonic characters that provide some color but not much else to the story. Hopefully if any of them come back they’ll do more than spit fire or flutter insect wings.

Stealing the show is Kevin Bacon as the power hungry Sebastian Shaw. Trying to take over the world is serious business, but that doesn’t stop Bacon from having some serious fun with the role.   

“X-Men: First Class” is a welcome addition to the “X-Men” movie series and a great example of how big blockbuster entertainment can entertain the eye (thanks January Jones and Jennifer Lawrence) and the mind.

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE: 3 ½ STARS

Other than Captain Canuck Wolverine is the best known superhero to hail from the Great White North. According to his comic book backstory he was born in 19th century Canada—Northern Alberta to be exact—and served in the First Canadian Parachute Battalion before being recruited by Team X, a CIA black ops group. When movie fans first encountered the character, however, little was known about him. At the beginning of the original X-Men movie he was suffering from memory loss and couldn’t remember how he became a superhero with retractable bone claws, the near indestructible metal alloy adamantium bonded to his skeleton and claws and a healing ability that allows him to quickly recover from virtually any wound, disease or toxin. The new movie, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, aims to clear up any questions about the hirsute hero’s lineage in a 107 minute CGI-fest that tells us everything we ever wanted to know about Wolverine, but were afraid to ask.

It’s quite a story. When X-Men Origins: Wolverine—written by David Benioff (The Kite Runner, Troy)—begins it’s 1845 and James Howlett (that’s the young, pre-superhero Wolverine) has just discovered his superhuman abilities. As an adult he (Hugh Jackman in his fourth turn as the character) and half brother Victor ‘Sabretooth’ Creed (Liev Schreiber) become elaborately facially coiffed soldiers, using their mutant powers in every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam. In Nam the brothers get thrown into the brig but are rescued by General William Stryker (Danny Huston), a warmonger who recognizes their special set of skills and recruits them for his team of mercenaries. And that’s all in the first five minutes. Later when James Howlett, now called Logan leaves the group he is branded a traitor and Victor is sent to retrieve him. On Stryker’s orders Victor kills Logan’s girlfriend setting Logan on a path of revenge. Meanwhile Stryker hatches a plan to create a super mutant and persuades Logan to undergo an operation to make him virtually indestructible.

Since this film, in its unfinished form, was leaked on the internet the world wide web has been ablaze with fanboy opinion. Judgments on the film’s merits have ranged from “a lesson in mediocrity” to “It's a movie that should be judged against such greats as The Godfather and Citizen Kane.” I fall somewhere between the two.

This may be my own bias, but I don’t go see movies based on comic books expecting air tight stories. I know that in comic book land the best books have well developed narratives but, rightly or wrongly, I give movies like The Hulk and Wolverine a pass in the complex story department. I go for the fun stuff—explosions, incredible fights, cool characters and wild CGI. With that in mind X-Men Origins: Wolverine earns a passing grade from me. It has plot holes you could drive a Brink’s adamantium truck through, but boy, they blow up stuff real good!

Richard Donner, the veteran director of 1978’s Superman was brought in to assist official director Gavin Hood in creating an audience-friendly back story based on Wolverine’s thirst for blood and revenge and his fingerprints are all overt the film. The mix of action, character and comedy feels very much like the first Superman.

Nothing here will come as much of a surprise to anyone familiar with the story or the endless blogging that’s been all over the web. X-Men Origins: Wolverine has the obligatory shots of Jackman walking away in slo mo from a giant explosion; some good acting from good actors like Danny Huston, Liev Schreiber and Jackman; some attempts at humor—a morbidly obese man wears a “Save the Whales” t-shirt and some camp moments—how many times can Wolverine howl at the sky?—that add some over-the-top energy to the picture.

On the downside the script is riddled with clichéd dialogue—“Whose side are you on anyway?”—and doesn’t come close to the elegant perfection of the first two Bryan Singer X-Men movies, but as an early summer popcorn flick it’s good fun.

THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE: 1 STAR

There’s an old joke about David Duchovny. In it he goes to a psychic to get his fortune read.

“I have good news and bad news for you” she says, peering into her crystal ball. “Which would you like first?”

“Give me the good news…” he says, breathlessly.

“Well… you will have a long career in movies.”

“Really! That’s great,” he says. “What’s the bad news?”

“Every successful movie you appear in will have the letter “X” in the title.”

And so we have X-Files: I Want to Believe after a ten year big screen Duchovny drought that included films like House of D, Connie and Carla, Trust the Man and many other movies you haven’t heard of. 

Set in a bleak and snowy West Virginia the story begins when a female FBI agent is abducted. After a convicted pedophile priest named Father Joe (Billy Connolly) has visions related to the agent’s disappearance the retired and reclusive Fox Mulder (Duchovny) is called in to help with the case. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) his former FBI partner, now his partner in life, has also left the agency and is working as a doctor. She grudgingly becomes involved in the missing persons case despite endlessly reminding Mulder that she’s “done chasing demons in the dark.” At the same time she becomes emotionally involved with a young patient who can only be saved with a radical, invasive procedure. When the psychic gives her a veiled, opaque message she wavers between trusting her head and her heart. 

On The X-Files television show, which ran for 202 one-hour episodes from 1993 to 2002, FBI Agents Mulder and Scully—one a believer the other a skeptic—investigated all manner of strange and supernatural phenomenon. No paranormal plotline was too far out for the brooding duo. They looked into the man-eating Jersey Devil, extraterrestrial serums and mutated killer cockroaches. The show was ominous and dark, but it had imagination, a trait sadly lacking from X-Files: I Want to Believe. Co-writer and director Chris Carter seems to have eliminated the “para” from the show and emphasized the “normal.”

The film is a run-of-the-mill detective story with a psychic angle tacked on. Cardboard characters—former Pimp My Ride host Xzibit     as Agent Mosley Drummy is direct from the angry cop section at Central Casting—repetitive dialogue and a non-climax make I Want to Believe a lackluster affair.

Duchovny and Anderson bring little of the sexual tension that propelled their relationship on the TV series. He has a few of the trademark Mulder one-liners—and there is a good gag that suggests George W. might be an alien—but Anderson’s role has been significantly reduced. She’s a doctor who searches for ways to treat her patients on Google and spends much of the movie chanting, “That’s not my life anymore.”

A big screen adaptation of a television show should improve on the small screen efforts, but instead series creator Chris Carter offers up a talky nonstarter that barely measures up to the source material. Even a casual X-Files fan could name any number of episodes far superior than this unnecessary remounting.

XXX

If James Bond were 20 years younger he’d be Xander Cage (Vin Diesel), the tattooed spy of XXX. From its opening moments this movie is in hyper-drive. The ultra-hip Cage is an extreme sports athlete with a website that broadcasts his stunts. When we first meet him he steals a car belonging to a Senator who wants to ban video games and rap music, two of Cage’s passions. But he doesn’t just steal it. He takes the car, manages to out manoeuvre dozens of police cars in a wild chase, and destroy the Senator’s corvette by driving it off a bridge and parachuting to safety. It’s just one of many crazy stunts packaged in XXX. There’s a daring escape from a restaurant, a spectacular snowboarding through an avalanche scene, and some motorcycle work that would make Evel Kenievel green with envy. Oh, there’s also a story… something about a ring of terrorists in Prague who are messing around with chemical weapons… but really, who cares, did you come see this for the plot? No you come to see the pumped-up cool guy Vin Diesel kick butt and do things that aren’t humanly possible, yet seem so effortless when he does them. He’s a great action star – smarter than Stallone, younger than Schwarzenegger and has even less hair than Bruce Willis. His appeal transcends his biceps, as he also appears to have a brain in his head. Throw in a large dollop of charisma on top of that and look out Steven Seagal, you’re about to be kick boxed into the old age home. XXX is big stupid fun – things blow up, wisecracks are flying left and right, and there are some very cool gadgets.    

X-MEN: THE LAST STAND: 3 ½ STARS

There was a ripple of fear in movieland when Bryan Singer, who directed the first two installments of the X-Men franchise, stepped down and was replaced by Brett Ratner. Why? Because Ratner is a hack. He makes bad movies and probably even plays hacky sack with his friends on the weekends. The high points on his CV were the Rush Hour movies, a dreadful—but profitable—duo of films starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker.

Happily I can report that the fear was mostly unfounded, and at best should be downgraded to a feeling of only slight discomfort. Ratner has made his best movie yet with X-Men: The Last Stand, but has taken an idea, involving a mutant cure, which could have been the best X-Men story arc so far and turned it into a conventional, but entertaining summer blockbuster.  

For the uninitiated, the X-Men movies are set in a world where mutants, genetically gifted beings who a variety of powers, struggle to find a place in a society that, for the most part, rejects them. A school, run by an enigmatic mutant named Professor Xavier—who looks a great deal like Patrick Stewart—is a safe haven for young mutants. They live there and are trained to use their powers for good. The school is also home to the X-Men, a band of superheroes who fight against mutant injustice.  

In the new film it is announced that humans have discovered a cure for mutancy. A simple injection that will turn mutants into homo sapiens, taking away whatever their natural power is. Of course this drives the most radical of the mutant, the ex-X-Man Magneto, played by Ian McKellen to stage The Last Stand, a face off between mutants and homo sapiens.

The movie shuns anything more than the most cursory comment on the ethics of the right of people to choose how they want to live or the effects of governmental control vs. freedom of choice. The allusions to Nazi Germany are obvious, but history is rich with examples of oppression that could have been mined here, but Ratner seems to be saying,  “Social comment! Leave that for the eggheads.” He is more content to make your eyeballs dance with elaborate special effects and crazy visuals. It’s a shame that the chance to deepen the material by placing it in some sort of social context was ignored. The movie, which could have been memorable, is now merely a good summer blockbuster.
A word of advice to X-Men fanatics: sit through the end credits for a little hint of what is to come in future X-Men installments.

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